Saturday, October 13, 2012

Looking For Insightful Business Knowledge Try Social Media Analysis Tools

About the Author: CEO/Founder of Nuvento ( a technology firm
that specializes in Business Intelligence and Software Architecture.)

Earlier, business enterprises relied heavily on their marketing managers
to formulate marketing strategies and create a buzz about their
company’s products and services. Today, with people’s increased
acceptance and usage of social media channels, that power has shifted to
the customers.

Now, it’s the customer’s sentiments about brands that drive a brand’s market strategy.

Critical Business Insights and Information Overload
Statistics reveal that 25% of search results for the world’s top-20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.1 enterprises are gathering critical business insights using the vast reserves of online information ( Facebook posts, Tweets, Blogs, You Tube Videos etc) to understand what is being talked about their and their competitor’s brand and services.

For an entertainment channel, this critical business input would comprise of trending topics related to their and their competitor’s programming content, viewership and reach. However, too much information can be misleading and confusing, and lacking in business value.

Filters of Information
While finding information about your brand and services is not a problem, finding appropriate filters to separate that useful information from the rest is still an impending issue for modern businesses. The vastness and high rate of data demands that the information available must go under more online processing so that only intelligence is captured and summarized.

Social Media Analysis Tools
Social media analysis (SMA) tools are a useful solution in this direction. These tools scan through the vast online reserves of information and filter out that information which is valuable for the organization’s business benefits. It also analyzes the reaction of what others (competitors, customers, potential customers, competitor’s customers, etc) are saying about an organization or their brands.

Using SMA technologies, the entertainment channel in the example above, would know in accurate details how popular or not their shows are, how many percentage of their viewers like it and how many hate it. They would also know the exact demographics of their viewers, the content preferences of individual viewers and also know in real time the global spread of the viewers.

Based on these critical business information, the channel can take appropriate steps to meet customer (viewer) expectations, gain competitive advantage, introduce new products and services (conceptualize new programming content) and simply enhance its marketing efforts and market reach.

The statistics also show that High-end social media analysis tools are in demand. On August 20, 2012, SEOmoz’s annual industry survey on the state of SEO and internet marketing2 indicated that 60.2% of the marketers are looking for analysis options in their social media management tools.

Shout Analytics is one such new-age social media analysis product that enables organizations to use the power of social media to understand, monitor and engage with its customers. Shout Analytics uses advanced NLP algorithms and are based on the latest technology stack that can handle up to 7-8 terabytes of online data. To learn how Shout Analytics can improve your business profitability, contact us at info@shoutanalytics.com